Former Wall Street banker Ben Rickert thinks we’re doomed and Adam McKay has to give it up: he’s probably right.

“Yeah,” the filmmaker says, calling the Georgia Straight from Los Angeles. “I had the scariest conversation with him, because he’s not a wackadoodle, he’s a very smart guy, and he explained to me in mathematical terms how the world is going down the toilet in the next 100 to 150 years. So, um—yeah! Scary stuff!”

Indeed, but one problem at a time. Rickert isn’t real, but the man he’s based on, Ben Hockett—with whom the director actually consulted—is one of the key players in the true events captured in McKay’s latest feature, The Big Short, opening Friday (December 23). The last time we heard from McKay, he was promoting Anchorman 2: The Legend Continues, although you can see the future in an earlier film by the former SNL staffer. Wall Street was the villain in 2010’s slyly subversive The Other Guys, but The Big Short attacks 2008’s global financial meltdown head-on, telling the insane story of the small handful of mavericks who did the math, predicted the crisis, and then discovered it was infinitely worse than they ever imagined.

“They told all the villagers to head for the hills because the tsunami’s coming, and the tsunami is even bigger than the hills,” as McKay puts it. “There was no chance for heroism, and they all kinda walked away just shattered.”

Doomsday scenarios and the high crimes of America’s financial elite aside—and The Big Short flips a particularly hair-raising factoid at its audience just prior to its end credits—this is an exhilarating film, animated equally by rage and the seriocomic chops of its cast. Ryan Gosling stars as the venal and supertanned banker Jared Vennett, who narrates (hilariously); Christian Bale disappears into his role of Aspergian one-eyed finance manager Michael Burry; Brad Pitt goes to town as the New Age–y Rickert. Meanwhile, a host of guest stars, including Anthony Bourdain and Selena Gomez, show up to explain (also hilariously) arcane financial concepts like collateralized debt obligation. (McKay calls it “the language of power”.)

It’s Steve Carell, however, who makes possibly the biggest impression, playing the one guy who legitimately acted out of something besides self-interest. Even as he serviced his clients, hedge-fund manager Mark Baum crusaded to expose the outlandish corruption undermining an out-of-control banking system. It’s a long way from the “mentally retarded” (their words!) Brick Tamland.

“Everyone knows Carell’s amazing, but I’d started seeing these hues and tones coming out of him that I hadn’t seen before, and, sure enough, when he jumped into this movie, he just went after it. It was a sight to behold,” McKay says. “I also knew that he had a bit of a bulldog demeanour, which is what Baum has. Most of all, I knew that he has great taste, that he’s never gonna play this guy as a larger-than-life cartoon. And that was my fear with that character, ’cause the real guy is kind of a larger-than-life cartoon. Carell walked into the room with exactly those instincts.”

It’d be interesting to note if anyone mathematically predicted his surprise emergence as one of the best actors currently working in film.